As ‘secret agents’ for the city, children use the app to send reports from their route to school about a difficult crossing or heavy traffic.
Photograph: Jon Skille Amundsen

If Pokémon Go has taught us anything, it’s that apps and gamification have the potential to change the way we interact with our cities; and as cities become smarter, citizens are increasingly having a greater influence on their development.

A new Oslo-based app has taken that idea further and is giving power directly to the people who, when it comes to urban planning, are too-often left out of the conversation: children.

Two years ago, Vibeke Rørholt, who has worked in traffic safety in Norway for more than15 years, began compiling a report that looked into road safety for children in Oslo. Commissioned to work for Norway’s Agency of the Urban Environment, Rørholt had to come up with a way to encourage the capital’s 44,000 children to walk or cycle to school. What better way to find out how they feel about their own security than by asking them directly?

A drive for sustainability

The Traffic Agent app was created to understand children’s concerns about their own safety in the city and is part of Oslo’s move towards greater sustainability and away from cars. The new leftwing city government announced last year it planned to ban private cars from the centre by 2019 as part of its initiative to halve greenhouse gas emissions. “The government said that all increase in traffic in Norway should now be done by cycling, walking or public transport,” explains Rørholt. Indeed, the country is on a sustainable push: there have been reports that the sale of fossil fuel-based cars will be banned in the hope of all cars running on green energy by 2025.

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Increasingly, cities across Europe are investing in different ways to become greener and more liveable. Peter Staelens, project coordinator at Eurocities, says the nature of the investment has changed. “Originally there was a lot of investment in roads and infrastructure for cars. I think that changed because practically all major cities have recognised that we need a modal shift away from the car so that more investment is needed for sustainable alternatives.” These alternatives include investments in public transport, electric mobility, cycle- and pedestrian-friendly areas. “It’s about making better use of existing infrastructure, improving the capacity and flow of the network,” adds Staelens.

Secret agents

With €347,000 (£290,000) in funding from the city, the Research Council of Norway and consultancy Capgemini, Rørholt needed to find ways to create an environment where parents would feel that it was safe enough for children to walk to school. “I was supposed to make a traffic report on all roads in Oslo. That’s a big job,” she comments. “So I thought, why don’t we ask the children how they feel on the street?” The best way to do that, she says, was to turn to gamification. Using a smartphone app, with the idea of users being “secret agents” for the city, children can send immediate reports on their route to school when they come across, for example, a difficult crossing on the street or an area of heavy traffic. Their location is tracked using GPS, so researchers can pinpoint exactly where these hazards are.

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The idea of crowdsourcing information to understand what needs to be improved in cities is nothing new. In Jakarta, Indonesia, the city started exploring how citizens could help address major issues including flooding and congestion. The Emergency Management Agency set up a project called PetaJakarta to create a real-time, crowdsourced map of flooding in the city. In San Jose, California, city authorities have set up what they describe as a “real-time civic engagement tool” whereby residents download a free app, and can send, for example, a photograph of litter connected to GPS that goes directly to city hall.

The positive impact on children

Asking children for feedback has never been done before in Norway, Rørholt says. She believes this is having a positive impact on children, and could be rolled out to other cities. “I received a telephone call from the mother of a little boy who had reported some bushes that meant he couldn’t see when he was crossing the street. And two days later the bushes were cut. She phoned in saying he’s so happy that he could make this happen.”

Rørholt says that using information provided by children through the app, authorities have rebuilt several big crossings and made more pavements to make it safer for pedestrians in the past year. For example, several students reported that they liked to walk through privately-owned land on part of their journey to school as it felt safer, so Oslo municipality agreed with the owner of the property that if the government created a crossing, path and handrail, he would maintain it.

Data protection is an issue that might deter parents and teachers from encouraging children to use this app, but from the beginning the Traffic Agent has anonymised data. The app is integrated with Norway’s school software platform which generates a code for each child to use as a login. This data is visible only to the school and project team. Rørholt also maintains that when the children start using the app from home, they don’t get a report until they move at least 200 metres away. To keep some privacy for the children, not all the information is shared with parents and teachers.

Although the app is in use only in the capital, Rørholt says the director of the Oslo municipality wants to see it shared across Norway, so other communities can use it at a low cost. It is a slow process: so far only 35 out of 135 schools have taken part. “I still don’t think we have changed the number of children walking,” says Rørholt, “and I hope that we will. I hope that when we can show the results – which we try to do on Facebook, as that’s where the parents are – we can get more schools to cooperate with us.”

Cities like Oslo are having to strike a balance between becoming both accessible and liveable, and it seems that crowdsourcing information from residents is the most logical way forward. Traffic Agent shows that children can even have a hand in how cities are planned – like where the safest place to build a school is – at just the click of a button.Talk to us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic and sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday.